Annals of the Neocomradely Konstitution

The Muses and myself hereby announce, Mr. Bones, that from today we will start collecting evidence of how Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh misconstrue the Fedguv Constitution in that power-grabbin’ direction so dear to the late Neocomrades D. Addin’ton, Esq., and R. B. Cheney, and G. W. Bush, and Gen. A. Gonzales, . . . and J. Yoo, Esq.

This wrong direction one may call "the unitary executive" if one happens to find oneself in a seminar room at some Prussian-style graduate school. For use out of doors, well, thee can look up what America’s Otherparty used to bark and bellow against "King Andrew I" and Mr. Van Buren of NY.

Our first specimen comes straight from the heart (as it were) of Hooverville. It does not altogether "speak for itself," but it does most of the heavy liftin’ involved in specifyin' what makes the neocomrades' Konstitution be neocomradely:

Wall Street Jingo of 17 February 2009

"With the economy in this precarious situation, no one wants to put the automakers into bankruptcy, but can this much restructuring be accomplished without bankruptcy?" said one auto adviser. Ultimately, the government will have to decide how much to subsidize the auto industry, he added. "That's a critical decision that only the president can make."

(( Well, well, so that's what they do with an HTML header! Make a memorandum of it, Mr. Bones! To get the label right on top of the textbox, thee must have no line break following it in thee’s script. ))

But seriously, the essence of Planet Neo, for konstitutional purposes, is that pretty well EVERYTHIN’ of the slightest important becomes "a critical decision that only the President can make." Mr. Madison and the Gang of ’87 spent a lot of time on the legislative and the judicial, but it was wasted as far as neokonstitutionalism goes. Talk about "all sail and no anchor"! [1] The clown at the Jingo manages to collide with Mr. Madison almost head-on, for doth not Holy Writ clearly proclaim that "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills" [I.7] and "The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts...." [I.8] ?

Now part of our purpose in making an anthology of Neocomradely konstitutionalism is to pin down its nature and its causes more exactly than we have yet managed to do without taking notes. However, we have already frequently expressed our preliminary conjecture that the Harvard Victory School MBA classes are the principal vectors of this brain disease.

The jeunesse dorée who have graduated from the former Allston (Massachusetts) College of Barbers and Chirugeons

with an eye to eventually becomin' like unto Neocomrade Ll. Blankfein of Goldman, Sachs [2] have been trained to keep their customers, and their hired hands, and their nominal directors -- and above all, the nominal owners of that ‘your company’ burbled about in the Annual Report -- in their place. How are credentialled Big Managers to bigmanage if they are continally distracted by petty annoyances like these? And of course at GS or GM or Warbucks Industries or ScroogeBank, the HVS MBA will not encounter any obstacles that correspond at all closely to Mr. Madison's Legislative and Judicial.

Thee will, I trust, have noticed a certain "deer in the headlights" look on the patients of that inquisition the other day that starred Mr. Frank of Massachusetts: the Avaricious Eight

simply had never run into that kind of obstacle inside the Sacred Private Sector.


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[1] Lord Mac was talking about a different question in 1857, actually. He was only knocking popular sovereignty in much the same way that Gen. Hamilton used to like to do.

Naturally as an endarkened Sasenach, he was thoroughly neocomradised avant la parole. The ‘omnicompetence’ of Parliament is worse than Yooianity itself, or would be in the absence of subtle informal signalings amongst the local yokels at Westminster that this outsider does not profess to be able to detect.


[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Blankfein